This invention relates to channel estimation, and more particularly for channel estimation in clustered OFDM receivers.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been shown to be an effective technique for combating multipath fading and is, therefore, a promising technique for wideband wireless packet data. Recently, clustered OFDM has been proposed to provide in-band diversity gain with wideband dispersive fading channels and to thus improve system performance.
For clustered OFDM in high rate wireless data systems, each user accesses several OFDM clusters located at different frequencies. This is illustrated in FIG. 1, where a wideband OFDM signal is divided into many non-overlapped clusters of tones in frequency, and each user accesses several clusters of tones. For example, in the FIG. 1 arrangement User 1 utilizes the first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth clusters; and Users 2, 3, and 4 use other clusters. In a transmitter, an error correction code such as a Reed-Solomon code or a convolutional code is used to create frequency diversity. Without channel information, differential demodulation has to be used instead of coherent demodulation, suffering a 3-4 dB loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. This is demonstrated in an article by Y. (Geoffrey) Li, L. J. Cimini, Jr., and N. R. Sollenberger, titled “Robust channel estimation for OFDM systems with rapid dispersive fading Channels,” IEEE Trans. On Comm., vol. 46, pp. 902-915, July 1998, which is hereby incorporated by reference. This reference indicates that channel estimation is desired for clustered OFDM to achieve high performance.
For classical OFDM systems, either pilot-symbol-aided or decision-directed channel estimators are used to obtain information. Similar parameter estimators are used to estimate the coefficients for the minimum-mean-square error diversity combiner (MMSE-DC) for OFDM systems with antenna arrays to suppress co-channel interference, or to estimate channel information required by the decoder of space-time code based transmitter diversity.
Prior art has shown that the optimum transform for channel estimation is the eigen matrix of the channel frequency-domain correlation matrix. Obviously, the optimum transforms depend on the channel delay profiles that vary with environments. Since there may be over a hundred contiguous tones for classical OFDM systems, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) can be used instead of the optimum transforms, with negligible edge effects. Unfortunately, in clustered OFDM, each cluster contains many fewer tones than in classical OFDM, and those tones that are on the edge of a cluster constitute a large portion of the total number of tones in each cluster. Consequently, edge effects are unsatisfactorily large if a DFT is used for the estimator in clustered OFDM.